Friday, September 25, 2015

Encouraging early signs

Training has been going well at the athletics club. Those who have been following my posts on this blog will recall that I initially started training with the athletics club to improve my sprint performance for the fire brigade competitions, and I later decided to compete in athletics as well.

Anyway, last night, the local fire brigades held a "winter comp" (yes, it's Spring now, this is the tail end of the series). Last night's events were the 2 man marshall, in which we ran just over 19 seconds in our best run. This time is at least a second better than anything I ran this time last year, yet, I felt I could go significantly faster. The next event was the 2 man Y, which only juniors (under 17s) run in the main competitions. Our best time was good enough to get 4th place. In these two events, the distances between each piece of work are very short, so the improvements aren't due to increased sprint speed. I suspect that training has subtly improved my overall gross motor coordination, giving me slightly better agility.

In the final event, I had a chance to try out my sprint capabilities, as after I finished my work, I then had a sprint of around 20 metres to the finish. The sprint did go well, and I had to pull up much harder to slow to a safe speed, before I ran into the fence at the end of the track! :)

In the meantime, training has been going well. Speed and sprint endurance are still gradually improving. Ran some hill climbs on Thursday, which brought out my power - I don't slow down that much going up hill.

So, early indications are promising for the coming summer on the fire track. Time will tell, when the season starts in early December. In the meantime, athletics season starts on the 10th of October, which will give me plenty of opportunities to test and improve my speed.